Dell, Oracle Make Cluster Push

Clusters of smaller, Intel-based servers will continue to overtake larger proprietary systems over the next few years, eventually becoming the predominant architecture in all aspects of enterprise data centers.

That was the message delivered on Wednesday by Michael Dell and Larry Ellison during a press conference here.

In announcing their companies' growing relationship, Dell, the chairman and CEO of Dell Computer Corp., and Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle Corp., said the low costs, easy deployment and high reliability of clustered, standards-based systems convince more and more businesses to migrate their data centers from proprietary Unix-based servers.